If crotchety upper-class vagrant Mary Shepherd hadn’t turned up on the North London doorstep of the celebrated playwright Alan Bennett, he might have had to make her up — if only to give Maggie Smith, our veritable Garbo of dingbat hauteur, one of the most tailor-made leading roles of her late career. Then again, perhaps Shepherd was partly his idea: The tension between life experience and authorial invention is the one complicating factor in “The Lady in the Van,” an otherwise heart-coddling, crowdpleasing study of two eccentric introverts — on opposite sides of the poverty line — finding common ground in more ways than one. Low on narrative drive, and marred by a misjudged final-act swerve into extravagant whimsy, Nicholas Hytner’s amiable luvvie-fest is enlivened by Smith’s signature irascibility; silver-dollar auds should turn up, if not in droves, at least in healthy vanloads.
“When I write about this, people will...
“When I write about this, people will...
- 9/12/2015
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety - Film News
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